I’ve been very bullish over the past couple of years about the role PaaS will play in a cloudy world. I see it as the future for cloud services. I’ve also commented about the increasing homogeneity of PaaS offerigns as they all start chasing each other to add new languages and frameworks – from the early days when a PaaS was seen as being language-specific, we now have a situation where most PaaS offerings support most languages and frameworks.

Into this somewhat generic landscape comes a bunch of people asking where the differentiation lies, and what pain points are left to solve to aid in cloud adoption. I spent some time recently talking with CollabNet and think they might just have an answer to that question.

It seems to me that once PaaS becomes sufficiently broad and stable as to truly deliver upon effortless application deployment and management, the next area for development for PaaS is in the actual application development space. Indeed when defining PaaS I have two broad terms – firstly collaborative application development and secondly automated application deployment and management. A PaaS that bundles these two distinct offerings up into one starts to sound pretty compelling. Think of it like a marriage of Heroku’s PaaS with Atlassian’s development toolset – kind of interesting right?

This is where CollabNet is starting to play. CollabNet is an enterprise cloud development vendor whose products power development for over 7000 companies of various sizes. CollabNet is in fact the company that originally sponsored Subversion and has a deep pedigree of Agile development approaches – their products include TeamForge, an Agile platform for distributed developers, Codesion a cloud hosting and integration platform and a couple of other development tools.

They are now releasing their ScrumWorks Pro Agile project management tool hosted on the Codesion cloud development platform. Essentially this connects a collaborative development platform that gives geographically spread teams and agile framework tool, with a deployment platform supporting multiple private/public cloud environments. Benefits that Collabnet are touting include;

  • Agile in the Cloud: Agile project management offered through a hosted cloud, and coupled with source code management and deployment solutions
  • Speed: provision and be up and running with ScrumWorks Pro rapidly, with no software installation or hardware upgrades.
  • Flexibility: Codesion’s platform allows users to provision ScrumWorks Pro alongside a list of other common development tools.
  • Enterprise-grade Security and Reliability: the Codesion-enabled ScrumWorks Pro, hosted in SAS-70 data centers, is “Security Standards Compliant” and protected with secure backup and disaster recovery systems.

It’s an interesting solution and one which may signal the way that other PaaS providers go moving forwards. General availability starts today and a free 30-day trial is available.

 

 

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • Francisca Klancnik |

    RightScale’s management tool on any platform is fantastic. The server templates really make deployments easy and manageable.

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